As of February 2015[update], approximately 25,495,000 American households (21.9% of households with television) have received Cloo, though this declined with later removals by several cable services as carriage agreements expired.[1]

Cloo launched on January 1, 2006, as Sleuth, replacing Trio. The channel ceased all operations on February 1, 2017.[2][3][4]

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Cloo focused on mystery entertainment, with the majority of the channel's programming sourced from fellow Comcast networks such as NBC and USA Network. As of the fall of 2016 the network's schedule was made up mostly of repeats of current USA Network series, and marathons of acquired series from the Law and Order, NCIS and CSI franchises, along with the original MacGyver and House. Films from the NBCUniversal library or acquired as part of USA Network's film rights purchases were also part of the schedule, meaning films such as Enchanted, The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Bee Movie with nothing to do with crimes or mysteries aired on the network.[5]

On August 15, 2011 Cloo was rebranded from its former name of Sleuth, in order for NBCU to be able to trademark and own the name, as the word "clue" itself is too common a name to be trademarkable and the commonness of both "sleuth" and "clue" would not work for search engine optimization. In addition, the different spelling averted any confusion with Hasbro's board game Clue.[6][7]

On August 10, 2013, Cloo was dropped by Dish Network, which cited that most of the network's rerun-centric programming was duplicative of that available on other NBCUniversal networks, streaming services, and the broadcast Ion Television network.[8] A year later on August 18, 2014, it was removed from Verizon FIOS for the same reason.[9]

Charter's Spectrum services (Charter, Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable) effectively ended the network's life in February 2017, as with Esquire Network (another Comcast/NBCU network which was discontinued on June 28, 2017), when it refused to continue their carriage of the network within their new carriage agreement with NBCUniversal, removing around 2/3rds of the network's homes (bringing it down to 8.5 million households[10]), and NBCU already had been looking to remove extraneous networks without original programming since the summer of 2016, criteria both Cloo and Esquire fell into.[11][12] In the end, however, industry media had little to no notice of the closure, and only cable providers learned of its demise in advance on January 31 as of 5:59 a.m. ET from Comcast, due to the small amount of time which passed between Charter's settlement of their new NBCUniversal carriage agreement and the network's closure. Because the network was effectively automated with little to no promotions to maintain, no employees were affected by the network's closure.

The same morning, its social media presences were removed (the network's Facebook had not been updated since September 2015), and the website redirected to the USA Network site without any notice. The network's last programming day consisted of a full-series marathon of Syfy's Continuum, a final sign of its later channel drift. Following the end credits, a slide was shown, with the Cloo logo and the words "GOOD NIGHT!" underneath, along with "Thank you for watching Cloo", the NBC Universal logo, and the name of the satellite that provided Cloo's broadcast (AMC 10, Transponder 7) in between 2 NBC logos, along with the common NBC off-air audio test using the network's trademark chimes, after which the channel space, in use since 1994 as Trio, folded and ceased to exist.[5][13] The end of Cloo was coincidental with another Comcast announcement that the female-focused Oxygen would switch fully to a true crime focus the same day within the coming months.

On February 25, 2007, the channel aired a fourteen-hour movie marathon entitled "Chiller On Sleuth" to promote the launch of Chiller, a sister horror and suspense programming that launched four days later on March 1.

Besides the above-mentioned series and franchises, various other series aired from the NBCUniversal library with rights through USA Network aired on Cloo, along with Walker, Texas Ranger before its 2015 departure to Grit and INSP. In September 2014, the rights to COPS previously held by now-defunct sister network G4 moved over to Cloo until new episode partner Spike took all control of the cable syndication rights of COPS at the start of 2016.